Daily Comment on News and Issues of Interest to Michigan Lawyers

01/29/2012

What's So Fundamental About Privacy, Anyway?

Privacy advocates are cheering United States v. Jones, last week's U.S. Supreme Court decision holding that police need a warrant to track suspects by GPS. NYU law professor Barry Friedman says "not so fast." In "Privacy, Technology and the Law" in Sunday's New York Times Friedman stands up for the proposition that fundamental rights remain fundamental in the face of time and new inventions, and worries that declining expectations of privacy are irreversibly eroding legal privacy protections:

Among the justices in the Jones case, only Sonia Sotomayor insisted that fundamental rights not be hostage to technological change. She called into question the court’s longstanding reliance on expectations of privacy, which she deemed “ill-suited to the digital age.” She suggested reconsidering the rule that the police can, without a warrant, get the vast amounts of information about ourselves that we give to third parties. To her, sharing our secrets — including e-mail and banking histories — with someone else does not necessarily mean the government gets access, too. It is too bad her separate opinion mustered no other votes.

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What's So Fundamental About Privacy, Anyway?

Privacy advocates are cheering United States v. Jones, last week's U.S. Supreme Court decision holding that police need a warrant to track suspects by GPS. NYU law professor Barry Friedman says "not so fast." In "Privacy, Technology and the Law" in Sunday's New York Times Friedman stands up for the proposition that fundamental rights remain fundamental in the face of time and new inventions, and worries that declining expectations of privacy are irreversibly eroding legal privacy protections:

Among the justices in the Jones case, only Sonia Sotomayor insisted that fundamental rights not be hostage to technological change. She called into question the court’s longstanding reliance on expectations of privacy, which she deemed “ill-suited to the digital age.” She suggested reconsidering the rule that the police can, without a warrant, get the vast amounts of information about ourselves that we give to third parties. To her, sharing our secrets — including e-mail and banking histories — with someone else does not necessarily mean the government gets access, too. It is too bad her separate opinion mustered no other votes.